by M. H. Baylis
‘Thank you, Terry,’ she said primly.
‘Do you want to er – get a coffee?’ He was like a puppy.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Seeing as you are the person on your feet, Terry, and I’ve been on mine all day, would you kindly get one for me? And for Rex?’
Terry looked from Rex to Helena and back to Rex, then nodded slowly. ‘Slice of baklava and two forks is it?’ he muttered, heading off to the milling kitchen.
‘I think you disappointed him,’ Rex said. He was glad Terry had gone. Even more glad Lawrence hadn’t been able to move his dental appointment.
She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’ But then she looked out of the window and said ‘What a place! Sky City! It sounds like it should be in China.’
Sky City was a little like the zoo: one of those bold flights of civic planning that seemed admirable in abstract, or even in Holland, but became a nightmare when translated into London stone. Conceived in the early 1980s as a housing estate on top of Shopping City, it was often compared to Palestine, and not solely because it resembled a thousand little box-houses on a hillside. Thanks to its numerous gangways and staircases, and its general isolation above the High Road, Sky City had become a haven for Wood Green’s grimmer elements, and around a third of its flats now stood empty. On the council-house-swap noticeboards in the library, people had become so accustomed to writing ‘Anywhere Except Sky City’ that AESC was now an accepted acronym, like WLTM or ROFL.
‘Is it a good idea for the old people?’ she asked, after reapplying some earthy-red lipstick. ‘Having to come up here for their community centre?’
‘It’s worse for the mother and baby group,’ Rex said. ‘You can only get one pushchair at a time in the lift. But until they start the renovations, there’s nowhere else nearby.’
She’d put the lipstick away in her bag, and was rummaging through for something else. She glanced up, a rogue curl falling across her cheek. ‘They should be building a new community centre then, instead of that zoo.’
‘It has been suggested.’
She gave up on her search. Rex caught a glimpse inside the bag as she did it up. A knot of scarves and possibly tights and small, zip-up bags: Dr Georgiadis was slightly chaotic. He liked that, without knowing why. And he was relieved the phone had been on the blink. There was an awkward pause, where they both smiled at one another, but lacked anything to say.
Rex looked towards the posters on the wall. One had a council logo, and it announced ‘ongoing maintenance’ to the whole of Sky City. So it was happening at last. Another, in Turkish, Greek and Kurdish, was about the dangers of gambling. The new video poker machines seemed to be the direct focus: a young man doggedly played one while reams of cash flew, Disney-like, from the back of it and out of the window, over the heads of his unhappy wife and baby.
He saw Terry heading back with the coffees and a well-practised grin. It quickened his resolve. ‘Look, er… Could I buy you a drink later? I enjoyed our walk on Saturday.’
She shook her head firmly.
‘Oh,’ he said, before he could stop himself.
‘Dinner,’ she said. ‘You got me absolutely drunk on Friday, then on Saturday you walked me round until I was ready to drop and I kept thinking you were going to offer me something to eat. Don’t people eat here?’
He smiled. ‘What would you like to eat?’
‘I don’t care. But I am a Cypriot woman, Rex. I eat. Tonight. In Muswell Hill.’
‘You’re on. Why Muswell Hill?’
‘Because this afternoon, I’m moving to that hotel you told me about.’
He felt a daft, teenage sort of pride as Terry returned and continued, artlessly but with clear intent, to chat up the doctor. He’d started telling her about the extra functions on her video camera, and Helena was standing there with him, at the tripod, and giving Rex a precious, secret, wry look when the door opened. She looked away from him to see who had come in, then quickly back to her desk. She began to busy herself with her papers.
Rex looked over to the entrance. An old man in the company of a much younger one were standing just inside the room, coats glistening from the rain. There was nothing strange about that: many of the pensioners here had brought along a daughter or a son – to drive, to interpret, to protect them from the darker forces of Sky City. In this case, Rex recognised both members of the pair. Bilal Toprak was Development Officer at the new council, a tubby, prematurely grave man in his early thirties. The real surprise was his father, the factory-owner, Kemal, who’d always borne the look of a circus strongman with his naked head, tank-like frame and exuberant moustaches. Now he looked derelict like his factory: white and shrunken, a hesitant look as he held tightly on to his son’s arm.
Rex went over. He’d known Bilal a long time: active in the Lib Dems, he’d quit the council’s Media Office for an elected seat, lost it, and then returned to climb quietly through the ranks of local government. That wasn’t an unusual story: serious, efficient people, imbued with sensible horizons and strong values by their immigrant parents, did well round here. They just rarely made the headlines.
‘You here for the meeting?’
Bilal led his father to the nearest chair and helped him off with his thick, sheepskin coat.
‘Dad wanted to come. He – he grew up in Cyprus. Place called Lapta. Is there somewhere I can…?’ He motioned with the coat. Rex realised the old man hadn’t said a word, and they were talking about him as if he’d disappeared long ago. He tried to make eye contact with Toprak Senior, but he just stared ahead, nervously rolling his jaw. His skin looked slack and lifeless.
Rex followed Bilal to the hooks at the side of the room. The Turks called a man’s pot-belly his ‘bread-basket’, Rex recalled. Bilal’s had become more of a skip.
‘Is your father all right?’
Bilal frowned from behind his round, administrator spectacles. ‘Not really. He had a stroke after the fire… Well, you know he did…’
Kemal had had the stroke whilst driving his van down Green Lanes, causing a tailback as far as the Palmer’s Green roundabout. It had made the front page in a quiet week.
‘He’s been okay,’ Bilal went on in a low voice, as they moved back to the seats. ‘But he just stays at the factory all day. He’s convinced the insurance are going to pay up any time. And then yesterday, he had a fright.’
‘We all had a fright yesterday.’
‘I heard about that. Mina, was she called…? Very sad.’
‘Your boss was on the phone to her uncle this morning. Are they acquainted?’
Bilal stared at him. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know who her uncle was. Is.’
‘What happened to your dad then?’ Rex changed the subject.
‘Someone tried to break in while he was on his own at the factory. It’ll only be squatters and that. But it’s set him back. His club’s not so relaxing to go to anymore, so… that’s why I thought I’d bring him over here.’
‘He goes in Trabzonspor, doesn’t he?’ Rex was sure he had glimpsed Toprak Senior once or twice, gazing through his moustaches at an empty tea-glass in the Turkish social club opposite the bus station. Like everywhere else, it was currently undergoing a makeover. ‘Trabzonspor is a football team, right? So why does he support Trabzon if he’s from Cyprus?’
Bilal blinked, a proper man of offices and meetings, unready for personal chat. ‘He left Lapta and went to the mainland, to Trabzon, on the coast. Lots of them did. Better life, you know, and there were grants, loans, things like that, to help. Mainly, that place is a club for Cypriots who ended up in Turkey. Well, it was.’ He added. ‘No one’s sure what it’s going to be when they’re finished with the works.’
‘Story of the area, isn’t it?’ Rex mused. ‘Your planning blokes are obviously busy. I got about three minutes with one yesterday morning. Ashley Pocock.’
Something crossed Bilal’s jowly face, before he nodded and rejoined his father. Was it concern? Irritation? Rex wasn’t sure which. It
made him want another word with Pocock, though.
The seats were filling up again, the smell of coffee mingling with unwashed wool and Deep Heat. Terry was standing next to the tripod, looking baffled.
‘Is Helena starting again?’ Rex asked.
Terry shrugged. ‘I dunno. She just went.’
‘What do you mean – went?’
‘Grabbed her bag and legged it out the door.’
Rex went to the door and looked out. There was a long, wet concrete walkway, leading to stairs. And no one to be seen. He looked back into the room. The woman in the Marks and Spencer’s uniform seemed to be quizzing Terry, and he was shrugging and pointing towards the door.
He headed out into the wet breeze, down the walkway. They were about a hundred feet above the High Street. He leant over. From above, Wood Green looked just like anywhere else: just heads, shopping bags and cars and buggies and dogs. It wasn’t just like anywhere else, though.
The walkway ended in a dark stairwell. You could go up, to higher levels of the ‘city’, or down, towards the street, in both cases accompanied by piss and gang graffiti and the mounting fear of encountering someone less scared than yourself. He assumed Helena must have gone downwards, but he didn’t know why she’d gone anywhere at all. Had arranging a dinner date just been too much?
On the next level, a sign pointed two ways. ‘Playground’. Playground? He doubted there’d ever been one of those. The other way said ‘Shops’. He pictured the planners. In their 1970s suits, in some colourful office decked out with executive toys and dolly-bird typists, sketching it all, so sure this city in the sky would produce happy, productive citizens. So deluded.
He assumed the ‘Shops’ route would either intersect with the lift, or join up with some stairs that took him to the ground floor entrance by the back of the Market Hall. Instead, it took him on another zigzagged, sloping walkway, its walls lower, a green metal rail making some half-hearted gesture towards safety. He ran his hand along it as he walked towards the scuffed, steel-clad fire-doors up ahead.
There was a kind of gantry running just over these doors – its rails done out in the same, council green and running around the side of the complex, level with the huge, illuminated signs that said CAR PARK and SHOPPING CITY. The gantry, he assumed, was for servicing the signs.
He smelled paint. A faint trace of it on his hands. Green, from the railings. With what was, perhaps, an old-fashioned sense of courtesy, he tucked a hand inside his jacket cuff to open the metal door.
Ahead of him was another doorway. A sign on the wall above it said ‘Caution: This Door Is Alarmed’, but there was no door, just a plywood frame, as if someone was in the process of rebuilding or replacing the important middle. There was a faint smudge of green paint on the wood.
Stepping through the wooden doorway, he suddenly realised where was he was. He took a couple of steps down. Then bright lights. Tinny music. On his left, an eerie shop in darkness, full of naked dummies, a bailiff’s notice stuck to the window. And then, to his right, the balcony. The escalator. Where Mina had fallen.
The escalator was off, and the whole lower side of the arcade had been shuttered off with huge, sliding grilles. He dared a look over the balcony, afraid what might be down there. But there was nothing. Only a couple of the yellow cones they put out when someone spilled a milkshake.
Then he saw something else. Exactly where he stood, looking over, were two more green smudges on the rail that ran either side of the escalator. A couple of feet apart. Just as someone’s hands would be, if they’d stood and looked over the rail.
He hadn’t imagined it. He had seen someone else up there. Looking over. Someone who’d watched Mina fall.
He went back to the plywood doorway, looking at the handprint there, wondering who owned it. What they’d been doing up there.
And then he saw something else. On the wooden frame, around the height of his shoulder. A scorch mark, scimitar-shaped, dark brown at the edges, a nasty black at the centre. He pulled out his phone.
CHAPTER SIX
It was only fitting, in this age of upheaval and upscaling, that the police should finally, after an eight-year wait, have moved to their new premises. Their former home, an ornately tiled Victorian building on St Ann’s Road, was boarded up while developers prepared plans of ever-increasing extravagance. Meanwhile, D.S. Brenard and his cohorts had decamped, as grudgingly as teenagers on a family walk, to a trapezoid of glass and steel on Seven Sisters Road.
C.I.D. now occupied a middle floor, instead of their former, delightful wood-beamed attic, and very much gave off the air of people who hadn’t settled. There were still piles of archive boxes in the windows, phone and computer cables snaked untethered across the carpet, and no one could ever quite get the temperature right. Whenever a big lorry passed, heading north towards the A10, the windowpane behind D.S. Brenard buzzed, and he glared round at it – a nuisance he refused to make peace with.
In spite of his frustrations, the neat, slight Welshman listened to what Rex had to say and looked at the photos he’d taken on his phone.
‘We weren’t sure which way she’d come into Shopping City, so that explains it,’ Brenard said, nodding sagely. ‘She must have come through the flats. I guess she knew that would be more private. Less chance of being seen before she…’ Brenard paused. He was a decent man, Chapel-bred, who rarely even swore. ‘… She did what she did.’
‘I didn’t even know there was a way through from the flats.’
‘Well there isn’t now. There was. Until about 1993. But it just meant the shoplifters would run off into the flats and no one could catch them, so they locked it and alarmed it, and just left it there for emergency access. They’ve been putting a new one in now – that’s why there’s that plywood frame.’
‘So Mina must have known she could get through.’
‘Well… it’s not a secret. They’re doing up all the exteriors, aren’t they? You even published the schedule of works in your paper the other week.’
‘You think she had it all worked out in advance?’
‘Maybe. Or maybe she tried to go through Shopping City but changed her mind and then ran round the flats and got lucky. If that’s the word.’
‘And this really doesn’t change it for you?’
For a second time, he showed Brenard the picture he’d taken inside the wooden doorway between the Sky City flats and the mall. The scorch mark: sharp and curved, a thorn made of soot. He’d touched it with his fingers, even smelt the petrol. He felt as if the smell was still on them now, on his phone, from when he’d stood, and dialled the police station.
‘I agree it changes the picture slightly, and I’ll be sure to mention it at the Inquest this afternoon. It suggests Mina stood in that doorway and set light to herself there, before she headed through onto the mezzanine in the shopping centre.’
‘But why would she do that?’
‘So as not to be seen before her act was final? To collect her thoughts in private before she went out? Maybe she stood there for a bit, with the lighter in her hand, looking at it, trying to get up the neck to do it, then she just thought, ‘Sod it’ and sparked it? Or even sparked it too early, without meaning to.’
‘What lighter? Did she have it in her hand?’
‘On a cord round her neck. The kind that slots into a little leather pouch. They go for them, the young girls, so they can wear tight jeans. And their mums and dads don’t catch on they’re smoking,’ he added. ‘Except of course they do.’
‘And you know she used that lighter?’
‘There wouldn’t be a way in heaven of proving that, no. But in the absence of a witness, it would seem so.’
‘But the person I saw, the person who stood on that balcony by the escalator was a witness. They stood there, looking over, down to the ground floor, and they had their hands on the metal rail, and they left their prints there, didn’t they?’
‘You said you weren’t sure you had seen someone else up th
ere,’ Brenard reminded him, patiently. ‘Those marks on the rail are not prints, they’re smudges and who’s to say they’re not Mina’s? The Sky City railings were being painted yesterday as part of the on-going maintenance. If she came through into the shopping centre that way, as your photo suggests, then there’s every chance she got the paint on her hands as she passed by.’
‘And then for some reason – while she was on fire – she put both her hands on the rail at the side of the escalator?’
‘Why not? Why wouldn’t her hands touch the rails? Doesn’t have to have been deliberate, does it? I‘m guessing someone on fire flaps around a hell of a lot. Unless they’re Buddhist monks. You seen them on the news? They’re the only ones I’ve ever seen, doing it, thank Heaven. But Mina was screaming, wasn’t she? She wasn’t calm.
Rex forced himself to remember. The scream. And the awful twisting dance. Almost like a dervish. He realised then that, in his mind, he’d made it seem like an accident. It looked like an accident, because Mina had screamed and writhed with such panic as she tumbled down. Because it wasn’t like the eerie, meditative suicides of those Eastern monks he had, like D.S. Brenard, winced at occasionally on the TV news. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t deliberate.
It only meant Mina hadn’t been prepared for the pain. The soft explosion as the air around her vanished and the space was filled with flame and horror and she realised there was no way back.
He shook himself. D.S. Brenard was looking sympathetic.
‘Hard to forget, I know. I’ve had a few like that.’
Rex nodded. But something still wasn’t right.
‘What about the painter?’
‘Eh?’
‘Whoever was doing the painting outside in the housing estate would have had paint on their hands. Maybe that was who was up there. That was who I saw.’
‘It’s the council’s own works department doing the painting and the door replacement. One of my team spoke to the bloke who was on it yesterday. Hang on…’ Brenard shuffled papers, tugged at a drawer, gave up, asked a colleague. Nothing was in its right place, it seemed. ‘A Mr Texo Chuba. Who was down at his van making some minor adjustments to the new door between 12.00 and around 1.30 pm. By the time he was ready to take it back up, the whole place was locked down.’
